Nurses Heal Environmental Injustice Through Community Partnerships

Abstract

Black, Indigenous, and people of color are disproportionately exposed to environmental hazards and are leading the charge toward environmental justice. Nurses have joined their call to action, supporting efforts to correct disparities, improve health, and enable just transitions toward resilient communities. Nurses are highly trusted and respected for honesty and high ethical standards. The profession has evolved from bedside patient care to include advocacy for environments that support health and wellbeing. The Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments (ANHE) promotes healthy people and healthy environments through professional education, leadership, research, evidence-based practice, and advocacy. In 2019, ANHE launched the first-of-its-kind Environmental Health Nurse Fellowship program to train nurses to work in partnership with communities tackling environmental threats and related health impacts. Funded by the Kresge Foundation, the program focused on environmental justice and health equity, and functioned as a tool for education, empowerment, and action. Thirty nurse fellows were matched with regional expert nurse mentors. They partnered with communitybased organizations on projects involving community-identified environmental health needs and solutions. Fellows conducted educational sessions on environmental health and justice for other health professionals, thereby expanding awareness of opportunities to improve health and promote environmental justice.

Just‐relations and responsibility for planetary health: The global nurse agenda for climate justice

“…Invoking food sovereignty, CANE advocated for Treaty Rights of the Mi'kmaw Nation to fish and hunt on their traditional lands (Canadian Association of Nurses for the Environment, n.d.). ANHE launched a fellowship program to advance year‐long nurse partnerships with Environmental Justice Communities in the United States (Kerr et al, 2022), and continues to convene nurse environmental activism and education (Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments, n.d.; McDermott‐Levy et al, 2022). In 2014 they saw a need to focus on climate change, expanding relationships among international nurse activists and becoming the first nursing advocacy group to participate in the 25th UN Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Madrid, Spain in 2019.…”

Developing Nursing Geography with an Ecological Lens

“…CHNs have a legacy of creating differential space in the interest of health justice (Cohen, 2010), and CHNs involvement in the EJ movement in the US is a good example of this spatial resistance and reproduction. A group of committed American nurses including CHNs-notably the work of Azita Amiri (Amiri & Zhao, 2019), Jessica LeClair (LeClair, Watts & Zahner, 2021), and the Alliance of Nurses for Healthy Environments [AHNE] (Kerr et al, 2022)-are producing a robust differential space for EJ in nursing on the whole. It is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a more comprehensive exploration of their work.…”

“…CHNs, and nurses in general, have several key roles and promising potential to engage effectively in EJ. From community-based participatory research, mapping, and public health education initiatives, from political advocacy to nursing curriculum design, CHNs are asked to prioritize the concerns of those affected and act with cultural humility when engaging with communities for EJ (Kerr et al, 2022). CHNs and their employers and professional organizations in Canada must work together to design environmental health and EJ assessment tools and reporting structures on behalf of the most vulnerable patients, who range from infants receiving their first vaccines to street-entrenched youth; seniors receiving end-of-life care at home; and Indigenous peoples accessing essential health services in remote coastal communities, for instance.…”